James Burke - Two for Texas

“Emile Landry is out there somewhere. You said it yourself. We got to move our ass across a big piece of country.”

“I ain’t arguing one way or the other. It don’t make no difference to me. I just said them squaws are going to treat her like sheep flop when she starts toting and fetching for them again.”

“Damn you, Hugh.”

“Make up your own mind about it. Don’t put them things on me.”

“I give you something,” she said. “Buffalo Hump’s rifle and the metal balls and the horn with the fire dust.”

“Now, you see, there wasn’t no decision at all,” Hugh said. “Where’s it at?”

“His woman put it in the ground by the spring in the trees after they killed him. Then she went back toward where the Americans come from.”

Outside, they heard horses’ hooves splashing in the mud.

“Let’s get it,” Hugh said. “Does she go with us or not?”

“I didn’t say she couldn’t, did I? Why don’t you stop all them tricks of yours?”

They stepped out into the rain and saw the women of the village taking down the tepees and rolling the deer skins and buffalo robes into tight bundles that they tied onto the tops of travoises with strips of hide. The rain drove through the skeletal frames of lodge poles and hissed in the fire pits. Iron Jacket and three other Indians sat bareback on their horses with bows and quivers of arrows over their arms. Iron Jacket wore his mail vest under his Mexican enlisted man’s coat, and he and the other Indians had streaked their faces with a mixture of blackberry juice and animal fat. They all wore buckskin breeches, and their legs clung to the sides of their horses as though they had been welded there.

The woman stepped out last from the tepee.

“White-Man’s-Woman no go,” Iron Jacket said.

“We took a vote on that,” Hugh said. “We decided we need somebody to keep on cooking for us and dressing out our game and such as that.”

“Woman no go on raid against Mexicans.”

“Now, you give us her as part of the deal for our horses,” Hugh said. “You sharped us a little bit on that trade, and I don’t want to lose what we got.”

“Only six horses. She stay with women.”

“We ain’t going to argue about it,” Son said. “She comes along, or you can go up against them Mexicans on your own.”

“Tonto boy,” Iron Jacket said. He motioned to one of the Indians behind him, who brought up two unshod, unsaddled horses by their bridles.

Hugh and Son pulled the reins back over the horses’ ears and slid up on their backs. The rainwater was cutting deep rivulets through the red clay earth in the center of the village. A white spiderweb of lightning broke across the sky, and the horses spooked sideways in the mud.

Son sawed back the bit and put his hand down toward the woman.

“Get on up here. Let’s find that rifle,” he said.

They rode at a walk across the clearing into the trees, while the Indian women finished loading everything that was of any worth to them on the travoises — jerked venison, scalded and salted piglets and dogs, clay bowls filled with flint arrow points, turkey feathers stiff with animal grease for arrow shafts. Only once before had Son seen an Indian village move so quickly, and that was in Tennessee when they heard that the white man’s fever, smallpox, had been found west of Cumberland Gap.

The rain dripped out of the pine trees in large flat drops that made the horses blink their eyes and toss their heads against the reins. The woman held Son around the waist, and he could smell smoke in her hair and that odor of fleshed-out raccoon hide in her clothes.

“You ain’t got to hold on like that,” he said. “These Indian horses can go through a woods at night like an owl.”

They were following the stream that led up through the piney woods to the Mexican fort, and just before the stream made a bend back through an outcropping of rock dripping with moss and fern, the woman pointed at a streak of water leaking through the roots of the pine trees high up on the embankment.

“There,” she said. “Under the rocks by the spring.”

Son reined the horse, and he and the woman walked up the rise to where the spring water glistened along the ground. Ahead, Iron Jacket and the other three Indians stopped their horses and turned them around in the stream.

“You come,” Iron Jacket said.

“Tell them to go on. We’ll catch up,” Son said.

“You tell him. I got a notion he might want that rifle,” Hugh said.

“He ain’t getting it.”

“Come now. Moon no pass when we take horses,” Iron Jacket said.

Son ignored him and began lifting a pile of flat stones that covered an eroded rock opening in the embankment.

“That rifle better be there, or them Indians are going to think you’re really crazy,” Hugh said.

The woman reached inside the opening and pulled out a long object wrapped in deer skin and tied with thongs. The thongs had dried and drawn tight as wire, and even with his teeth Son couldn’t loosen the knots.

“You’re going to be eating with your gums, boy,” Hugh said, and flipped his knife underhanded up the embankment.

Son unrolled the deer skin from the rifle, and then he saw the long barrel and the tapered stock and the flintlock action.

“A Kentucky,” he said.

Even though in the dark he couldn’t see every detail of the rifle, he already knew each piece of it from memory as well as an ancestral mountain veneration for the weapon that Daniel Boone and his men had carried. He knew the wood was maple or apple and had been wrapped with tarred twine which the gunsmith burned away to give the stock grain. The bore was rifled so that the ball would drop only three inches in one hundred yards, and the balance was so perfect under the trigger guard that just the removal of the split-hickory ramrod under the barrel would upset it. He cocked back the hammer and opened the flashpan and ran his thumb along the smoothness of the steel. No water or rust had gotten to it, and the sides of the octagon barrel were as slick as when they had been honed in the smithy’s vice.

“Look at it, Hugh. My uncle owned one, and he could knock a turkey’s eye out at fifty yards with it.”

“It ain’t worth a shit to you tonight unless you got the rest of it,” Hugh said.

Son propped the half-moon brass butt piece of the stock on his thigh and flipped open the rest of the deer skin. Inside the folds was a powder horn with a beveled wood plug at the bottom and a smaller one in the loading end. He hung the horn across his chest by its thong and unsnapped the cover on the elongated brass box set in the rifle’s stock. He touched his fingers along the.45 caliber balls and the greased cloth patches that were used to slide them down the barrel and seal them tightly over the powder.

“It’s like White-Man’s-Woman said. It’s all here,” Son said.

“That not my name,” she said.

He looked at her strangely in the flicker of lightning through the tree tops. Her eye with the small white scar in the corner, like a piece of string, was pinched at him in the drip of rain from the low pine limbs over their heads.

“You never told us your name,” he said.

“Get it down here, Son,” Hugh said. “Iron Jacket is fixing to blow a brown hole in his britches.”

It had stopped raining when they rode out of the creek bed into the perimeter of woods that bordered the meadow where the Mexicans kept their horses. The night was still dark, with a crack of moonlight between the clouds, and a thick low fog floated in pools over the knee-high grass. The horses were penned in a one-rail corral, and two soldiers sat by a fire under a sheet of canvas stretched on poles. Son’s horse began to nicker, and he leaned forward with the rifle balanced on his thigh and cupped his hand over its nose.